CANADIAN-Scot Martyn Bennett was an inspired and inspirational composer, a dreadlock-sporting “techno piper” who died young after making trailblazing albums fusing traditional Celtic music with hardcore techno and dance beats. “Hoose music”, some called it.

Martyn Bennett-Knight was born on February 7, 1971 in St John’s, capital of Newfoundland and Labrador. His father, Ian Knight, was a Welsh geologist and musician. Skye-born mother Margaret Bennett was a Gaelic singer and folklorist.

Martyn spent his first five years among the Gaelic-speaking farming folk of Codroy Valley who provided early exposure to traditional Celtic music.

The family then moved to Quebec. However, his parents separated when he was six, and his mother took him back to Scotland. They stayed briefly on Mull, before moving to Kingussie, where aged 11 he had his first lessons on the Great Highland bagpipe from “amazing” history teacher David Taylor.

By the age of 12, he was winning junior piping competitions and, at 15, moved with his mother to Edinburgh and won a place at the City of Edinburgh Music School, based in Broughton High School. Hitherto this had been a classically inclined institution and here he learned to read and write music, while taking on the violin and piano.

Martyn described his three years there as the most important of his life, saying: “Broughton was major for me. I was really thrown in at the deep end with these classical musicians.”

In 1990, he began studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, with expert violin tuition by Miles Baster, first violinist of the Edinburgh Quartet. Even more importantly, he met Kirsten Thomson, who later became his wife.

During his final year, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer but recovered after six months of treatment.

Struck a chord
Bennett was influenced by early 1990s dance music, regularly attending clubs and, after graduating in 1993, invested in a keyboard sequencer. The dance world, he observed, “is principally about sound and scale, tension and release, power and detail – much like the classical canvas”.

He worked with Martin Swan’s Mouth Music project, which provided his performing debut at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on January 14, 1994, as support to the show’s combination of traditional Gaelic songs and music with contemporary instruments.

In 1995, he released his first eponymously titled album, recorded in seven days at Castle Sound studios, Pencaitland, for Edinburgh-based independent label Eclectic. One piece, Floret Silva Undique, uses a poem by Hamish Henderson, who later said of Bennett’s work: “What brave new music.” Brave enough to see him invited to play at the Stirling Castle premiere of … Braveheart.

Bothy non-ballads

In 1998 came Bothy Culture, matching Gaelic, Middle Eastern and Scandinavian music to electronica. The opener, Tongues of Kali, “a party tune” in Bennett’s words “with a pile of twaddle over the top”, features bagpipes, sitar and thick vocal gargling compared by one reviewer to the sound of “someone whacking a caber tosser’s thigh”.

Most memorably, Hallaig features Sorley MacLean reciting his poem of that name, while Ud the Doudouk has Bennett playing a Middle Eastern woodwind instrument to folk-techno beats.

With Kirsten on keyboards, Bennett formed a band, Cuillin, to tour the album. He played T in the Park and Paris before Scotland’s opening game against Brazil in the 1998 World Cup. Sean Connery, Ewan McGregor and Ally McCoist reportedly danced on stage.

In 1999, he moved to Mull, where Dundonian musician Martin Low helped with Hardland, released the following year on his own Cuillin label. Also in 1999, The City of Edinburgh Music School commissioned him to write Mackay’s Memoirs for its centenary.

A piece for chamber orchestra, featuring pipes, clarsach, strings and percussion, it was performed at the Scottish Parliament’s opening celebrations.

After performing at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2000, a Mojo reviewer said: “Scots music has never sounded like this before. No music has ever sounded like this before. Half the audience fled in fear of their lives.” Bennett sold 1,000 CDs after the set.

Alas, that year, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, receiving chemotherapy and radiotherapy for eight months, followed by major operations in succeeding years.

His fourth album, Glen Lyon, a cycle of Gaelic songs, appeared in 2002. It features his mother’s voice and a sample of Peter Stewart, his great-great-grandfather, singing in 1910, taken from a wax cylinder recording.

That year, he married Kirsten and the couple moved back to Mull. That made him happy but illness did not and, stressed out by being unable to play, he destroyed £20,000 of instruments, his “babies”, after which, horrified, he didn’t speak for two days.

Nevertheless, in 2003, he produced Grit, his final album, regarded by many as his best. It splices samples of unaccompanied Scots travelling singers, and Gaelic singer Flora McNeil, with recordings of his own playing and pulsating electronic drum beats.

Sing sing
MOVE, the opening track, samples traditional singer Sheila Stewart performing Ewan MacColl’s Moving On Song. Liberation features Michael Marra narrating an English translation of psalm 118. Nae Regrets weaves Dundonian singer Annie Watkins with choruses of Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.

Bennett noted that, while grit in shells produces pearls, cancer was “like a piece of grit in your soul”. He died at the Marie Curie Hospice, Edinburgh, on January 2005, 30, aged 33. News quickly spread among those attending the last night of Celtic Connections, but was held back from Edinburgh Music School pupils who were recording Mackay’s Memoirs the following day. His funeral was held on Mull.

His memory and music live on. A memorial concert was held at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. The Martyn Bennett Trust was set up by family and friends to help young musicians. The 2006 Celtic Connections programme included a Martyn Bennett Day.

In 2008, Margaret Bennett released a CD single, Love and Loss, with Martyn accompanying his mother’s singing. Mr McFall’s Chamber, a string quartet from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, toured with a tribute show Aye: An Affirmation of Martyn Bennett

In 2013, Creative Scotland announced an annual prize, named in his honour, for new music composition. A stage show, Grit: The Martyn Bennett Story, conceived by Cora Bissett and written by Kieran Hurley, was created for the 2014 Commonwealth Games cultural programme.

Meanwhile, Bennett’s friend Greg Lawson recreated Grit with an orchestral score, assembling 80 musicians and singers at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall for the opening concert at 2015’s Celtic Connections.

Lawson, an accomplished multi-genre violinist, noted: “It’s amazing how many people you need to accomplish what he did by himself.”